Cliffski's Blog - The psychological value of ownership, and how free to play games use it.Free to play works because it doesn’t ask you to value the game until you already feel you own it. How much would you pay for farmville to buy it outright? maybe $5? But play the game for free for a month, build up your farm, invest it, and then hit a plateau in the game where you really need to buy coins to continue…. and suddenly YOUR game is worth a lot more than $5. You value the game you already own very highly, and so buying add-ons for it is just common sense. I suspect this is why DLC works so well, and sells so well. You have already made a commitment to valuing the game, by investing your time. Only a fool could try to rationalize NOT spending money on it now…

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eRe4s3r wrote on Feb 11, 2013, 22:32:Part of the reason for that is of course that there are no f2p games that offer any immersive fun gameplay experience.

Meanwhile, League of Legends has like zillions of players, then there's Tribes: Ascend, Airmech, Path of Exile, Mechwarrior Online, Planetfall 2, etc. F2P is not just crap like Farmville, browser games, and failed MMOs. It includes some hardcore games, some of which are actually pretty good.

It's a brave new world. Between F2P and KS, publishers are being kicked to the curb pretty good now. LOVIN IT!

And all those decent F2P games tend to not hold your sense of fun hostage, at most they allow you to quickly customize your play experience to what you want for some cash.

Which again is completely missed by Cliffski here.

And I agree with Eraser. For many games, if I haven't plunked money down on it, I have almost no attachment to the game. It has to rock my f*cking socks off for me to keep coming back to it. Whereas if I'm already invested, dammit, I'm going to get my money's worth of fun out of this thing if I have to wring it dry.

Let's make this a practical example. If Cliffski had made Gratuitous Space Battles F2p, and I started playing it strictly on it's merits, I probably would have lasted about 10 minutes... well before even the first hypothetical pay-threshold. As is, since I blew 20 bucks on that... thing... I stuck with it for a few hours before moving on.